One Day I’ll Be Drawing Comics for Big City Publishers, and All You’re Ever Going to Be is Mean

I wish I could say the worst bullying I ever got was in high school. I had braces, very thick glasses, was pudgy, had acne, a lisp and a stutter. When I was fifteen, I decided to embark on a self improvement program, and ticked off a list of flaws to address to transform myself before my 16th birthday. I attacked each item like I was on a military mission. Braces off, lost weight, got contact lenses, and saw a doctor for my skin (scarred from both acne and a bike accident that sent me dragging down the road for 20 feet on my face). My school sent me to a speech therapist. I spent hours every day working on my new person, which included reading books about how to be less introverted. When I came back from summer vacation, old friends didn’t even recognize me.

I went from ugly duckling to Senior Superlative. It was nice, but disorienting. Same person, different look. I was treated differently by almost everyone.

Especially in fandom, where the assessment of my IQ immediately dropped by 40 points based solely on my appearance.

The good news is, for those being bullied…gang, it gets better. Just like high school, this too shall pass. Better yet, the great thing about a fan group that isn’t very nice is, you don’t have to pass a test to graduate and get out. You can just pack up and walk. Any time you like. Really. And believe it or not, absolutely nothing will happen to you! Outside of these little fiefdoms, these people have absolutely no power. No power over real life, no power over your professional aspirations, no power over you. At all. The only real problem you will ever have with these people is between your ears. If you don’t want to play in their sandbox fiefdom by their bizarro rules, find another sandbox. There are lots of them. And when enough people finally get tired of dealing with their B.S., their fiefdoms will die.

There are better fan groups, better fandoms, better people.

Find them.

There’s nothing “limiting” about not associating with people who don’t know how to treat their fellow human beings with respect and decency. There is something terribly limiting about thinking an abusive group of people is something you have to tolerate out of some kind of misguided ideal about “inclusion”.

Here’s some satisfaction; everyone who ever gave me a hard time isn’t doing so great now. I got everything I ever dreamed of.

Fortunately, I did make some very wonderful lifelong friends in high school, but also got bullied. While I missed the slamming into a locker experience, I had my textbooks stolen and burned right behind my house, and one particularly nasty duo got ahold of one of my yearbooks and wrote some pretty vile stuff in it. I had to toss the yearbook. Two girls made my life miserable for years. When they graduated, almost all the bullying went with them. Then again, they graduated when I was 15, so I wonder what their reaction would be if they had seen me come back to school the next year.

I never got bullied by the popular kids, and never bullied when I became one.

Since I was on the popular kids list the last couple of years of school, I got to see things from both sides. I don’t bother to associate with anyone I didn’t like in the first place, but am very lucky to have made lifelong friends in school.

I really don’t see how fandom treats people any better than school. My early experiences in fandom were much worse than school, and I don’t associate with anyone who gave me a hard time, even though I am astonished how often they crawl out of the woodwork to contact me now. They’ve really got to be kidding.

But like school, I also made lifelong fan friends.

I just don’t pretend that fandom is some sort of special place where all your problems dissolve in a glittery unicorn leap of universal acceptance.

Well, as one who identified with Bernard Marx in “Brave New World” my senior year, I got off pretty easy. Of course, that required keeping a low profile, counting the days just like grunts in ‘Nam, and finishing graduation so quickly that my mother yelled at me for not being able to get a picture of me in the gown. No, no senior pictures for me. No senior yearbook, and the other two volumes are buried deep in my archives.

There’s only one classmate I’ve actually blocked on Facebook. The rest get an automatic reset.

I suppose I should caveat this by adding that I did get some pretty nasty treatment from a few pros, mostly back in the 1980’s, who were heavily involved in fandom, too. And it was another “just walk away” decision that turned out to be harder to make than it was to execute.

Each time I cut the line from one of these people, everything else in my life improved exponentially, professionally and personally. I also must conclude that since I’m older and have better judgment, I tend to spot the bad ‘uns before they become a problem now.

Toxic people are poison. Don’t argue with them, don’t expect them to see the light. Don’t expect anything. Just walk.

Of course, I had a few more recent unpleasant instances, but over the last decade, I found that avoiding ten people on the periphery of comics prodom and fandom would save a world of grief. I used to do backflips trying to figure out what was wrong with some situations, make friends with every woman in comics, and be accessible. But it’s just not do-able.

Fannish politics are one big reason why I stopped associating with fannish groups a long time ago. Things could get very nasty very quickly. I also found it strange that a groups that were usually composed of fairly socially marginalized people would be so conformist. They never seemed to take the lessons of their own marginalization to make more inclusive groups.

Fortunately,HS was a good experience for me. I went to a liberal arts (emphasis on the “liberal”) magnet where cliques were looked down on by everyone. There was no social pecking order – you had preppies hanging out with mohawk sporting punks. I would have been miserable at a regular HS.

I look at high school as being sent up to the Big House – I did my 4 year sentence and put as much distance between that place and myself as I possibly could!

I know what it’s like to have next to nothing and have that fact lorded over you, so I try to take the higher ground when looking at what has befallen some people I used to know. Though, I’m not that nice of a person and do get some joy out of seeing how far I’ve come in contrast to some of the so-called “in crowd” who peaked in high school.

Finding fandom online was great, at first. Discovering I wasn’t quite alone in my interest in comics was wonderful and corresponding with some of the regulars on various boards made for some interesting times. Unfortunately, a few too many had cases of arrested development and would bash anyone they deemed as not being “true fans”. Got to the point where I just moved on and haven’t been back in years to those boards. Some have tried to friend me on Facebook; but as I’ve done with others I’ve cut off contact from, I just deny the request. Life is too short to willingly put up with trolls that can easily be avoided.

I have made some friends within fandom – gotten together offline for birthdays, conventions and such, so there is a positive side. Just the loudest ones are often the most emotionally stunted. As the Bard once wrote: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

@justinkim – that comment made me laugh, and remember so many silly fandom wars.
As we say in Mexico “En todos lados se cuecen habas” (it may translate like “Every family has a black sheep” ) as all of you wrote above, every fandom may have positive things and others that would peel the dirt from the walls of a sewer.
I really never felt included while I was in high school, and when my bullies tried to contact me in FB, I really thought “why?”
“We were never friends back then, why would I care to see you now? ”
I was dumb to allow one by mistake, and the first thing this person did was ask me if I could give them a job, or some of my contacts with publishers “cause you draw toonies, right?” *facepalm*
Send them to an illustrators link, and wished them good luck. (lesson learned. I know)

As for anime fandoms, they can be amusing when they get so loud and in a war path about their likes, dislikes, what’s cannon, what’s not cannon, shipping wars. Jesus! That’s why I always kept myself outside any specific fandom
I like way too many things to just devote myself to one, and even those things I like have flaws, so its dumb to try to “protect” something that’s not yours to begin with, and that will be behind you when the next “Hit of the Year” appears.

“There’s nothing “limiting” about not associating with people who don’t know how to treat their fellow human beings with respect and decency.” Colleen, that’s a great line.

I was not popular in high school and that is why I found fandom so inviting. It was a good experience for me and it significantly increased my confidence.

One of the best things about not being popular is that I can proudly look back and say that I never bullied anyone else.

So, instead of my 30th high school reunion, I chose instead to go to a Con and find my old “real” friends, many of whom were still there. Yes, politics is ever-present, but fortunately I was always on the sidelines.

Fans and Fan bully = Biggest reason I don’t go to cons (cost aside) and radically cut back on my online fandom associations. I’m a fan to have some fun and cause I enjoy the product, not cause I care about every little nut and bolt details. Sometimes I think a lot of fan just look for something to complain about.

I’ve ever been a part of comics fandom, just observed some aspects of it from afar. On one hand, there are professional circles I’d love to be active in just to meet people and get the creative synergy going, but on the other hand, a lot of “synergy” stuff seems to involve drinking yourself silly over here. There’s also a certain amount of exclusiveness going on with people knowing each other from the same couple of schools that teach these things over here. So the circles are very small. The online communities have come off as the most off putting places ever with their bitterness and meanspiritedness and though I could use their promotional opportunities, I don’t know why I’d put myself in that situation voluntarily. I just like reading comics. All I care about is a good story and good art. Or just one of the two. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast, much less names off artists in one off pieces. I ordered a local Comics Journal-type magazine for a while and I still love those issues, but I’ll be damned if what they said about some of the indie comics had any resemblance to how I experienced those magazines. They always made everything seems really deep and grand and then when I got my hands on the same books, all I could think was WTH?! So there’s that. I don’t think going to hang out on a board with the people who wrote all that stuff to talk about comics would be beneficial to either side.

As for high school.. I was never bullied there per se. The bullying happened earlier, in high school I was just the odd one out. I have accepted a few friend requests from people I knew then and it’s become very clear why we weren’t dear friends back then. People grow up but the broader personality streaks rarely wear down. To be honest, I don’t really know why I’m friends with these people on FB beyond my morbid curiosity over how they look and if they look older than me. 😀